24 January 2007

KDE Happenings and Version 4

Recently there has been a wealth of information about KDE4 which is going to be the new version based on Qt4 with loads of new technologies. I thought I'd put all of the recent good links into one handy place.

KDE in Suse Linux 10.2 is reviewed here. It has some really impressive screenshots of version 3.5 which doesn't even have the splendid new features. It features the new start menu type thing called Kickoff, check out the link to see it animated.

Bizarrely what kicked off this wealth of information about the progress of KDE4 was someone making a blog post saying there was no progress and no future progress in desktop Linux. It was completely misguided, but it started an avalanche waking up a dozing beast, one of the KDE developers made this post.

A list of features targeted at KDE4 can be viewed here.

There is an article about the SVG rendering in applications here.

You can view an article about the KOffice 2.0 technologies here.

There is now a proper installer for running KDE on Windows seamlessly. This is detailed in this article. Also there is now KDE for Mac (so it integrates properly into OSX and not like those X11 applications). There is some coverage of this here. Both of these are possible thanks to Qt being GPL on both platforms now at version 4.

Finally there is an article about the new job progress user interface. It looks like it could be quite useful.

Overall, exciting times are ahead for KDE and the Linux desktop.